


second night

by essektheylyss (midnightindigo)



Series: sacris [2]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Childhood Trauma, Consecuted Mighty Nein, Memory Related, Multi, Past Lives, Recovered Memories, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-22
Updated: 2020-02-11
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:02:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 6,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22366852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midnightindigo/pseuds/essektheylyss
Summary: The second life is unsettling, brand new and altogether too familiar at the same time. The second life is where you learn to remember.Part two in a long, meandering consecuted Mighty Nein series, over the course of lifetimes, about choosing people over and over and choosing yourself.
Relationships: Beauregard & Caduceus Clay & Fjord & Jester Lavorre & Nott & Caleb Widogast & Yasha, Essek Thelyss/Caleb Widogast
Series: sacris [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1604926
Comments: 34
Kudos: 173





	1. found

**Author's Note:**

> Part two has begun! I'm having a lot of fun and breaking my heart again with every chapter. 
> 
> I'll update tags as I go along!

The dreams are of fire and demons and oblivion, and he doesn’t know how to escape until he wakes up, the young drow drifter who sneaks into Port Damali’s finest libraries and follows around archivists at the Cobalt Soul who don’t know what to make of him but treat him with a pleasantness not afforded to him by the rest of the city. 

They haven’t seen him wake up screaming, though, for parents he has never met, for names that he doesn’t know, names he can’t quite remember by the time he’s fully come to consciousness. He isn’t really asleep when he trances, even when he dreams, but he knows what it feels like to sleep, and the dissonance between his body and the one he occupies in his sleep creates a divide between sleeping and waking that is altogether foreign to him.

It is only when he ventures to mention it to one of the younger archivists, one who sometimes brings him food when he’s reading or lets him stay a little longer when the archive begins to close, and they take a longer look at his pointed ears and his deep purple skin as though they’re seeing him for the first time. They point him to a shelf tucked deep into the stacks about the Kryn Dynasty, and the religion of their Luxon, and he begins to read.

It all feels _wrong_ , though, this blind faith that he has never had the luxury of, but the more he reads everyday the further the dreams go, and he learns to use his trance state to push past the fire and the horrors hidden there and to deep inky skies and a house with an illuminated tree six stories high growing on top of it. To libraries and towers and scars and spells, and he picks out books on transmutation and time and pours over them too.

And in some of those books, ones whose edges have not yet faded or crumpled and whose ink is still bold, as though it had been written yesterday, he finds names that feel familiar though he has never heard them until now, and he stares at lines of text about a transmutation mage who did much of his work in the Dynasty, who perfected spells that no one had yet accomplished, who had taken ancient musings and turned them into creations that had changed the course of history. He stares at the name, his head in his hands, and though he’s already committed it to memory he cannot stop staring, at this name that feels like he should be answering to it. 

This is not who he is, he thinks. He is not some famous archmage with a penchant for time and transformation. He is only an orphan boy without a home, but even that feels so correct, and he presses the archivists for more information on this Caleb Widogast.

And the more he reads, the more he learns, and the further he goes into a life that shouldn’t belong to him. It belongs in the history books he reads, in the tales he has heard bards tell on the streets, but it does not belong in his head.

And other names come up in the books as well, other names he can put faces too. A little goblin—or maybe a halfling; for some reason he cannot say which, and he cannot decide on her name. A half-orc with a sword as sharp as his smile. A rough and tumble human whom he loves like a sister. A blue tiefling, all mischief and chaos. A firbolg who smells like soil and sunlight. An aasimar with a book of pressed flowers clutched in her large hands.

And there are others whose names do not arise in the books, at least ones who are not famously associated with this life that he has lost and found again—a lavender tiefling whose visage brings tears to his eyes, a beautiful drow with a quietness and a softness masked by a sharp demeanor. 

He cannot help but weep at the vision of them all, in his mind, and he sits at a table in the Archive with tears streaming down his face, burying his head in his hands. 

He doesn’t remember death. He reads how it happened. He doesn’t want to remember. 

He remembers the before, though, the pleading in the wizard’s tower and the resigned look in the drow’s eyes. 

He doesn’t want to remember.

He starts to teach himself spells. Small things, useful things. Mage hand, to pickpocket from afar—he doesn’t steal when he can help it, and only from people who look like they can afford it, but he needs to eat and this is the easiest way, the safest way. He is an oddity on the Menagerie Coast, where he had originally started sneaking into libraries because they were cool and dim and offered solace from the sun. He learns Friends, to move more easily in the city. Mending, to keep what little he has safe. 

After weeks of working and building up to anything higher than a cantrip and gathering components, he sits down in a dark alley in the middle of the night with a large quantity of incense stolen over the course of days, and he takes an hour, keeping one ear out for guards as he does it, and he casts Find Familiar.

When the large orange cat appears in his lap, already mid-purr, he breaks down, his fingers burying into the thick fur, pressing his face to Frumpkin’s shoulders as the cat continues to hum, and it’s the first time he has felt like anything resembling himself in… maybe ever. He’s never had the luxury of a personality either, not when his life has entailed hiding and surviving.

This is right, this is right, this is _right_. 

He needs to get to the Dynasty. He needs to find his old friends. He needs to get back to them.

It’s where he belongs, and after drifting for the life that he can remember, all he wants is belonging again. Especially now that it’s something he can taste, every time he closes his eyes. 

But Rosohna is across the continent, and from the maps he’s seen and what he’s read of political divides and _what he remembers of the Empire_ it would be easier to cross on foot Tal’dorei than it would be to wander the Empire as a drow. He has now remembered what it felt like to be accepted in that land, but that is not who is now. He looks like he is from the Dynasty, and he will be treated as such.

But he’s been to Rosohna, can see the white outline of the teleportation circle below the Lucid Bastion, but the lines aren’t clear enough to use and besides, he’s only just managed a spell more advanced than a cantrip. The slowness that the spells return to his fingers is infuriating, now that he can _remember_ , but he doesn’t have the spell book that is just fuzzy in his memory, and he is not exactly that person anymore. 

Teleportation is not an easy thing to master, but he must, he thinks.

He doesn’t have anything left here for him, and everything awaiting him there.


	2. mirror

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh boy, this was hard to write—super interesting exercise, but man have I gotten used to writing quick-thinking high intelligence characters.

When the dreams come, even the nightmares, they cause no concern. 

It’s merely one more fascinating aspect of a fascinating existence, these dreams of another life that they can’t quite pin down. They approach them with a calmness that would probably seem strange to one other than a guardian of the tree, but they have been on their own in the deranged wilderness of the gods for a long time, and this is only another piece of the puzzle.

Besides, the Wildmother does not give them any reason to worry about it, so they don’t.

She is there too, in the dreams, caressing them in their solitude, in their loneliness, and in this life they do not worry about family so much as they once did. There are others to take care of that now; they are tending to a different portion of the Wildmother’s domain now, to the tree.

They know that another tree waits for them to the south, one that grows among rock and rubble alike, a spark of Melora’s life within Earthis’ domain, but they will not return to it in this lifetime. Perhaps the next will bring them back there, but for now they live beneath the tree.

The rocs and the udaaks do not concern them, nor do they bother them; there is nothing in this land that wishes to harm them besides the land itself, but so long as they sleep in the Wildmother’s shadow, the verdant grass cradling them in the darkness, they are safe from whatever deep magics may seek to bring them harm.

There is one tug, though—the faces they see in those dreams, arms reaching for them and them reaching out in return. It calls them to abandon the tree, to return to Erathis’ reach, but though the Wildmother does not urge them to stay, they still do not leave.

It is the Moonweaver’s servant who passes by every now and then who reminds them to stay, a devilish creature with a wicked smile. They do not speak when they meet, only spend quiet days in the shade of the tree before the servant moves on again, when the moon has passed its zenith. 

They do not know who the other is, but they know they are a friend, to allow them safe rest and nourishment beneath the Exemplar. 

The Moonweaver’s servant has been wandering these fields for much longer than the Wildmother’s steward has lived beneath the tree; their face is weathered and weary, and the steward wonders whether the servant will ever abandon their post.

Do they remember how to speak? The steward has never tried, and the servant has never asked that of them.

It is a long time before the steward asks, throat rough and harsh from lack of use, “Do you remember the before?”

The servant sits quietly against the base of the tree, their red eyes masked behind heavy lids, their tail moving with the breeze. The moon is high overhead, the only source of light, but it illuminates the tree overhead. 

“I remember blood, and pain,” the servant says, and their voice is not so rough as the steward’s. Perhaps their travels have brought them to further reaches than the steward had imagined, but the Moonweaver has always had a more abstract grip on the world. “I remember love and hatred. I remember feeling empty. And feeling whole.”

The steward is quiet for a long while after that, and the servant does not force them to speak again. Finally, of their own volition— “Do you ever think you might return?”

The servant smiles. Through it all, their eyes have not opened, and the steward cannot say that this is not sleep talking, as mysteriously as the Moonweaver sometimes works. They cannot even really say the servant is real—they are simply the only one who has ever come to visit. 

“Perhaps in another life,” they answer. “But I have earned my rest in this one. I have earned a peaceful existence.”

The steward has never wandered beyond the shadow of the tree, with the Wildmother’s warning that there are more things to fear there. In the tree’s shadow, they are protected, but beyond that, the earth’s lacerations run too deep for her magic to penetrate. 

The steward wonders how the servant considers traversing that land peaceful, but then their red eyes open, and they fix the steward with a grin so wicked it is a wonder it doesn’t slice the land open again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You didn't think I was gonna forget Molly, did you?


	3. sun

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Writing fic is my favorite Friday night activity. (Not sarcasm.)

The outskirts of Asarius are a deadend, but the Ifolon River is an escape.

Only half drow, she has only ever been half welcome in her home, among her region, in Asarius. She doesn’t know her human father, and in this lifetime, she doesn’t think she’ll go looking for him.

She remembers what it was like not to care so little for humans, but it’s been a long time, and before the memories began to fade into her mind, she was so used to the culture here that it is hard to change her mind now.

When the memories do arrive, though, that is part of why she keeps them to herself. She remembers standing in the shadow of the Empire’s seat of power, remembers the humans who visited the brothel, remembers the lips of the human girl against her own. Any one of those memories are dangerous in Asarius, but even more so for the girl with the human eyes.

And her mother has always been distant anyway, colder than she remembers her first life being, and she has only grown up feeling like a burden. This was never a place where she felt confined to, nor a place she wanted to stay, and yet it feels every more claustrophobic than the memory of the back room in the Lavish Chateau.

On the eve of her sixteenth birthday, she packs up as much as she can carry, feeling the weight of it in her arms, the phantom weight of a magical haversack on her shoulders as she runs away. 

She finds a dock five miles down the Ifolon River, once the sky has turned the faint lavender color of her skin, always so reminiscent of the tiefling she had loved and lost. Her feet are sore, no longer used to this kind of travel, but there is no other way to travel. She collapses to her knees, the rotting wood splintering in her skin. It is just another dead end. 

She lays there on her back while the sun climbs, and the soft gurgle of the river’s path turns to the rush of the tide on the shore of Nicodranas. She wonders whether her mother will come to find her, drag her back home, but this mother has never cared if she was around or not. 

She can remember, just a little, what it was like to be loved, but it feels like a winter’s sun—too distant to provide any real warmth. 

She doesn’t know how long she lays there, in and out of sleep, before a voice carries across the river. “Dad, there’s a girl! She looks half-dead!”

She doesn’t open her eyes at the voice, though something in her chest sings, just the smallest amount. The voice is not familiar to her body, but it is to her soul.

A merchant vessel approaches, on its way downriver from Asarius, heading for the ocean and the coast lines beyond. And hanging off the railing, dangerously close to an edge, a drow teenager with a shaved head perches, their stance dextrous and uncaring, watches her like a hawk as she turns her head to see the boat grind to a halt. 

“What are you doing there?” the drow calls to her, and the cadence, something about the voice… she knows it. 

She stands, feels the soft _whoosh_ of a green cloak at her shoulder. There is renewed strength in her limbs.

“I’m looking for you,” she says, without knowing quite why she says it, but when she catches the drow’s sharp lilac eyes, she thinks she might drown in them.

The drow evaluates her, their grasp on the railing tight, before they call, “Can you swim?”

She looks down at the river between them, and blinks. “I’ve never tried.”

The drow’s grin is a sideways slash, and she can see the hint of a mouth she’s kissed before in it. “It’s like riding a horse,” they call, and air hums in her lungs, in her nose.

“Like sailing a boat,” she replies, and the drow laughs as she dives into the water, leaving most of the remnants of this childhood behind.

A merchant family is an easy place to hide, all cousins and caravans and ships, and they’ve made the trip around the world several times over, the adventure and experience they’d been denied in another life. “We’re on the way back to Marquet now,” they say, and she can’t think of a time she saw them this comfortable, in another body, in another life. “They offered to send me to Rosohna, back to the dens, but… I think I’ll stay here for a while, with my family.”

She relishes the way they say ‘my family,’ something that their past life would’ve refused, and yet she can’t help but feel a hint of bitterness stir up in her soul. This is what they deserve, after the hand they were dealt in their past life, but she can’t help but wish she had gotten the same.

They must notice her get quiet, her pursed lips, because they catch her chin with their hand. “You’re welcome here, now,” they say lowly, and wrap their long limbs around her shoulders. “This can be your family too now.”

“How much do you remember?” she whispers, looking down at her lavender palms, expecting blue. Always expecting blue. 

“Some,” they shrug, their arm slung easily around her now, and she rests into the crook of their body. This is comfortable, it’s right. This is a luxury that she has not been afforded in a long time, but it is one that she will melt into without question and without worry. It has been missing for so long. “I remember how to fight. I remember how to speak. I remember…” they wet their lips, and look over the plains of Xhorhas, beyond the far railing. “I remember speaking with dignitaries and the queen. I wonder what she’d think if she saw me now.”

“I’m sure she would be thrilled to speak with you again.”

They smile. “Maybe. I’m a lot more welcome around here now.” Their skin is as dark as the night sky, and they don’t look concerned against the light now, but she wonders how they fare on the deck when they aren’t shaded by the wooden crevices of the boat as they are now, cool away from the heat of the midday sun. Like they can read her mind, they pull a set of tools from their pants pocket, fiddle with a set of lenses and scraps of metal. “I’m learning to build things,” they say, and she cradles the contraption in her hands, as delicately as if it were a baby bird. It’s not quite _something_ yet, but it’s certainly on its way there.

“These are going to be goggles. Like the ones I had, that gave me night vision, but for the day. So I don’t have to worry about the sun.”

“These are beautiful,” she murmurs, and without thinking presses a kiss to their cheek, in the crevice of their bones. They freeze for a moment, uncertain of the movement, but when she pulls away, face flushing pink, they pull her in tightly and press their own lips to her temple. 

“Thanks, Jessie,” they answer, and the two of them hide there, away from the scorching afternoon sun, until their father calls them to help them dock in the next port.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Badass nonbinary artificer monk Beau? Don't mind if I do!


	4. stowaway

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Been debating which ways to go first—I think we're going to jump ahead and come back for the rest.

In the end, the teleportation circle in the Lucid Bastion is always slightly out of focus, and though he manages to accomplish the spell, the memory doesn’t come back to him enough to get it right. 

Instead, four years later, he finds his way into the cargo bay of a ship.

It’s a familiar feeling, the rocking of the waves against the hull, and he thinks of his pirate days and his family, as far away as they are.

He wishes he’d taught himself Sending, but he didn’t even know if it would work on consecuted people he had known, no longer the same people they had been before. Did Sending target the body, or the soul? He couldn’t say, and he had chosen to prioritize his time elsewhere.

He spends several days smuggling dried meats out of crates and sleeping too much before he gets bored and complacent enough to cast Dancing Lights, pulling his makeshift spell book from the pouch he keeps on a leather band that buckles across his chest. It is painstakingly held together with string, papers bundled into a pamphlet, every spell lovingly recreated from the pieces he can remember and the bits of information he gleaned from the Archive. They aren’t mages, so the technical aspect of spellwork isn’t recorded as well as the history of magic, but that’s okay—more spells come to him everyday, in bits and pieces, and he scrounges together enough money to put together the materials to record them.

It is this trip that worries him. More so than getting caught as a stowaway, losing his work up until this point terrifies him. 

And it is this impulse that brings him to pull the papers out of their pouch, to evaluate any moisture that they might be gathering down here in the damp cargo hold, and to prepare spells that he might need for the journey.

And then the voice rings out, bright and excitable, far more than he thinks it should be considering it means he’s been discovered. “Hello?! Is there a stowaway?”

The cadence is nearly familiar, but he blinks away the memories and snuffs out the lights, pulling them back into his hands and backing into the shadows.

Another light bobs toward him, a figure with a hooded lantern, and a girl of some elven descent approaches him, the light rocking back and forth with the shaking of the ship.

There isn’t really a place to hide so quickly, and he must be a sight—a thin, malnourished drow with a stack of parchment and a cat.

No—Frumpkin has bolted from his side toward her, and he thinks, _Traitor!_ as the orange cat disappears into the shadows between them and reaches her feet.

She isn’t looking down at the cat though, no—she holds up her lantern to peer at his face, an ear-to-ear, shit-eating grin, and shimmies her shoulders. “Ooooh, where did you come from?”

“Jessie,” a low voice comes from further back, still in shadow, and a drow individual with a shaved head approaches. “What did you find?”

“I _told_ you someone was down here,” the woman grins still, but the drow isn’t looking at either of them. No, the drow has noticed the cat at their feet, the orange tabby rubbing against their ankles, and they stop in their tracks, then bends to meet Frumpkin with a gentle scratch at his cheek. He purrs heavily, and Caleb closes his eyes and sees through the cat’s.

It is strange, how a cat, especially a fey cat, can identify a soul more than a person. It wasn’t something that he had noticed, in his previous life, because he hadn’t been looking for other souls, but now he can see immediately who is in front of him.

It seems one of them at least has come to the same conclusion. Fey cats are good for many things.

He hasn’t opened his eyes all the way when the drow rushes toward him and throws their arms around his neck, and he can almost remember the sensation of being hugged—he doesn’t know that he has ever been hugged in this lifetime, so he only has memories of his past life to consider. 

But Beau hugs as fiercely and tightly as he remembers, and it takes only a moment before his arms raise instinctually.

He knows how to do this. He remembers what this was like.

And all at once, the memories become a little clearer. He pulls back, heart pounding, and holds them by the shoulders, gasping for… not air, but clarity, the fog of two lives mingling in his head parting a bit. 

It’s them, it’s really them—he hadn’t quite trusted that he might find them again, and now that he has his fingers grip them tightly, like they might vanish if he lets go. 

Then he looks past them to the half-elf woman, who looks like she’s on the brink of tears, and she throws her arms around them both.

“Jester?” he asks, incredulous, and she nods.

“Where have you _been_?” Jester screeches, and he can’t tell if she’s even stronger in this body than she was as a tiefling, or if he’s just smaller now. 

“I’ve been in Port Damali, stalking Cobalt Soul archivists, trying to remember the Rosohna teleportation circle enough to use it,” he says quickly, and, oddly enough, a hint of his Zemnian accent slips back into his voice. He presses a hand to his mouth, everything new and familiar all at once, and Frumpkin winds between their legs as they stare at each other. “Have you two become pirates?”

“No, no,” Beau laughs, one arm around his shoulders and one arm around Jester’s. “Only on occasion.”

“They never see us coming,” Jester grins wickedly, and he thinks he can hear a hint of her old accent as well—it’s not there, exactly, but the idea of it is, in every lilting sentence she speaks. 

“I need, I need…” he stares at Beau, a drow like him, and looks them up and down. “How do you fare on the high seas in this body?”

They shrug. “I deal. Besides, I was never really one for casting, and otherwise it doesn’t do too much. Besides, I’ve got some cool shades.” They pull out a pair of goggles, and he examines the craftsmanship, bronzed with burned glass, and intricate runic designs inscribed on the metal around the lenses, then looks back up at them. 

“Not one for casting?” he asks with a grin to rival Jester’s, and Beau shrugs.

“It’s not casting, it’s _infusing_. And I can do it down in my quarters in the dark, thank you very much.”

“You learned artificing skills? I’m impressed. You didn’t go back to the Cobalt Soul?”

They look a little guilty, a little amused. “Well… I never actually told them about the consecution, so… thought they might be a little confused. Also, possibly pissed. Or they’d just make me go through beginner training again, which I have no interest in.” They take a fighting stance, and do a one-two punch in the air to demonstrate. “Like sailing a ship.”

It has been a lifetime since he has had a family, and he can feel tears prickling at his eyes. After so long trying to remember them, it feels almost as though they are illusions, standing in front of him, and he reaches out again and places one hand one each of their shoulders. “I thought… I didn’t think I’d ever find you again. I feared—“ 

“Yeah, we, like, totally need a meet up spot next time,” Beau nods, slipping the goggles onto the crown of their head. They certainly look like an artificer now, and his heart soars with pride for what they’ve both accomplished. 

“Are you still an acolyte of the Traveler?” he asks Jester, and her face lights up. 

“Of course,” she answers, as if it was obvious, and it is. Nothing has changed so much, not really. “The Traveler is, like, the coolest.”

“Yes he is,” he murmurs, emotion flooding his voice, and he pulls them back in for another tight hug. When he pulls away, there is renewed hope in his eyes, rather than the simple fear he had begun this journey with. Alone, he has so much farther to go, but his companions do a lot to bridge the divides that he has been trying to cross for his entire life. This one, at least. 

“Tell me, can you help me send a message to Rosohna?”


	5. deliverance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have somehow ended up with two pirate PCs and two fics that are currently taking place on boats. Not sure how that happened, but.... yes good boats.

The voice is exactly as he remembered it, when it comes to his head, and he freezes in the middle of his movement, his mind so distracted that his toes dip and hit the ground. Twenty years has passed since he’d last heard that lilting voice, reassuring him that everything would be fine the day before everything broke, and he can’t help but remember how much it irked him the first few times it had entered his mind like this—now it’s like a ship on the horizon after years stranded at sea.

That’s what the last two decades have felt like, after virtually everyone he loved had marched happily to their deaths. 

“Esseeeeek,” Jester croons. “I’m with your soooooulmate. We’re on the coast, soaking in the sun, having lots of fun, being number one… You may reply—“

His response cuts her off before she can generate enough words to use up the full extent of the spell, and he can’t stop the breathless sound of his voice, his mouth dry. “Where are you? Tell me where to find you immediately.”

He almost botches the teleportation, and he isn’t sure if it’s because the location is so abstract or if the tremble in his limbs is enough to throw him off course. When he lands on the deck of a ship half a mile from the shore of the Menagerie Coast, he staggers to a halt beneath the moonlight and stares at the three of them, and the emotion in his throat is almost too much to speak. 

“I told you,” he finally exhales, “I told you to bring an army, I told you not to go, and none of you can leave well enough alone—“

His voice has risen to a snarl now, all of the fear that has been pent up for twenty years in his shoulders and his clenched fists unleashed onto the only people who needed to hear his words. 

“Essek—“ the drow in the middle says, and he knows in an instant that it’s Caleb, knows from the way he says his name that for the first time in twenty years Caleb is standing in front of him, looking like one of them, and his limbs shake as he takes one uncertain step forward.

“Twenty _fucking_ years! Terrified that you’d been too far from a beacon, that you’d been lost—everyday that passed I assumed the worst—“

Caleb steps forward and catches him before he has the chance to sink to his knees on the deck, overwhelmed from the grief that he’s kept hidden under the scrutiny of the Dynasty for too long. “I’m sorry,” Caleb stammers, and Essek clings to his shoulders like he has never known solid ground, like gravity has forsaken him for the first time in well over a century. He’s sure Caleb can feel his entire body shaking as he withholds the tears that threaten to fall. “I’m sorry, I’ve tried for years to remember the teleportation circle well enough to come back to you, I’m sorry—“

His voice is shaking as badly as Essek is, and it’s not something either of them want anyone else to witness, but here they are, in front of their friends and each other with two decades between them all and yet no time at all. 

The lithe muscle beneath his fingers is lean and toned, and he can’t breathe with the weight of everything Caleb has been through while Essek simply didn’t know who he was, wouldn’t have known to find him. He finds his footing, enough of an unfamiliar thing on solid land, and he holds Caleb’s head in his hands as though he can take on whatever pain he has lived while he grew. 

Essek has not yet learned to die. It is something of which he is reminded often enough, not in word but in the expressions he gets in mixed company when he says something that isn’t quite right, identifies him as a younger soul than anyone else in the room. It is strange to think that now Caleb—his Caleb, uniquely, beautifully human Caleb—knows a piece of his culture better than he does. 

“Where—“ he breathes, as he runs his hands over the sharper lines of his drow features. “Where have you been—“

“In Port Damali, on the streets,” Caleb smiles sheepishly.

“Family, parents—“

A dark look comes over his lilac eyes. “No, no. I don’t know what happened to them. Penance, I suppose.”

Essek presses their foreheads together, eyes pressed tightly shut. Every word feels like another thin blade in his heart, one after another, every pain that he wishes he could’ve altered with the wave of a hand and the heady effect of dunamis. It’s not something Caleb has asked for, or will ever ask for, but it’s something he wishes he could bestow all the same. 

“Come home then,” he breathes, and under cover of the darkened sea, he doesn’t hide the flush in his cheeks. It’s undignified to beg, but he has been clinging to his dignity for so long that for now it can be left to the wayside. “Stay this time. Stay with me.”

Caleb tenses as quickly as he had relaxed, but he doesn’t withdraw. “You know I have never been good at staying still for long.”

“No, you can’t leave damn well enough alone,” he murmurs, eyes still closed, holding back the tears that he knows are gathering. He chokes back a wet laugh. “But then again, neither can I. We just… choose different strategies for poking our noses into business that we have no right to.”

Essek wraps his arms around Caleb’s shoulders, and they stretch longer than they used to, his elven frame thinner than the body Essek remembers. “For now, though. For now, home,” Caleb says, his own hands holding Essek tightly. “But perhaps… perhaps in the morning. If that is alright with you.”

“Of course,” Essek says sharply, pulling away slightly until Caleb catches him. His features are dark, clouded, and Essek isn’t sure what’s wrong now. “I’ll await Jester’s message and… come and retrieve you in the morning.”

“No, no,” Caleb says hastily, and the pink tinge across his face is as endearing as it is infuriating. “I mean to say— you should spend the night here. On the ship. Beau and Jester have already said we may stay.”

He’d almost forgotten about the two watching from a ways away on the deck. Well, the half-elf has been watching; the drow is pointedly tinkering with something, looking like they might drag the other into the hold of the ship themself. 

“How long has it been?” Caleb asks in a rough whisper that sounds so much like the gravelly Zemnian voice that he’s used to that it sends a shiver down his spine. “How long have you been holed up in Rosohna?”

It’s Essek’s turn to be sheepish, but he’s never quite managed the expression. “Ah. Twenty years, I suppose.”

“So _you_ stay,” Caleb murmurs, and Essek is near certain he can hear the lilt of the accent, and wonders what it is like to return to a tongue that no longer knows the shapes of the language that he must now _know_ , whether or not he has been taught in this lifetime. “You can be the one who leaves, for once. Or you can stay.”

“That’s rich.” It’s an idle retort, but the smell of the ocean breeze and the fact that there is no dry land for a hundred miles draws him in, and he can already feel the heavy air of Rosohna pressing down on him. “You know, eventually Den Thelyss will drag the lot of you back to the fold. That is the price you pay for this.”

“Oh, they can try,” Beau calls as they draw a knife along a piece of wood, confirming that they’ve been listening, but he would expect nothing less from a former expositor of the Cobalt Soul. 

He wishes that he were not so certain of how things work in his culture; it is much harder to break the rules when you know them better than you know yourself.

“Stay,” Caleb says again, and he can’t turn down those eyes. They are different now, purple tinted like his own, but they are the same in every way that matters. 

“Do you remember the ship?” he asks later, limbs folded over one another on the rather lumpy cot in the cabin they’ve been given, too uncertain that this might be a dream to let themselves fall asleep. Instead they lay there, hearing the waves lap gently against the hull outside, reminding themselves silently that the warmth of the other person is real, it’s real, this is real. “Your ship?”

“Ah yes,” Caleb murmurs, his eyes fluttering closed. The slightest smile plays on his lips. “The Squalleater.”

Essek blinks, and props himself up on one elbow. “Caleb, that was not the name of your ship.”

“Oh no? What was it?”

“You changed the name to the Balleater.”

Caleb bursts out laughing, and Essek shushes him immediately, in fear that he may wake the others, but it comes in fits of giggles, and Essek can feel his face burn when Caleb answers, “Oh, I remember. But I don’t think you’ve ever said its name out loud. I wanted to see if you would.”

Essek shoves him, but in the small space they only get further entangled. “You bastard. You’re a far better liar in this life.”

“I was always a good liar. Maybe you’ve gone soft.”

“Maybe you were not so used to lying to me.”

The silence settles for a moment, and Caleb looks up into his face in solemn evaluation. “What happened?”

Essek blinks. “You don’t remember?”

“I remember leaving. I remember you trying to dissuade me. Other than that, I… I read about my own death in books.”

“Oh, my dear…” He catches fistfuls of Caleb’s shirt in his hands, clinging to him with all of the rage that has festered over the last two decades. He’s been screaming against a glass barrier since that day, but now that the object of his anger is before him he can only weep.

Even alone in his home, he struggles to release emotion in any way, but this ship does not remind him of the chains of his childhood, the cold eyes of his youth. 

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs, before he realizes that Caleb is apologizing too, and he shakes his head and rests it against the pillow beside him. “Isn’t a lifetime enough time spent scrabbling on hands and knees for atonement? Isn’t it enough to have died in the process? _Gods_ , Caleb, you might as well have walked to the gallows and hung yourself—”

“And what if you had been there to watch over me?” Caleb asks, and Essek can feel the cold accusation behind his words. They are both owed whatever accusations they wish to throw, after what happened, but he wishes it didn’t leave such a bitter taste on his tongue. “You do not always need to be _left_. I am not the only one choosing their path.”

“I have responsibilities, I can’t just saunter into near-death— _certain-death!_ —situations, leave my post—“

“You don’t even like your post,” Caleb snarls, and it is a combination of the intensity of his past life’s voice as well as the sharp syllables of such a sharp language as Undercommon that causes Essek’s retort to die in his throat. “You walk your tower as though you are _caged_. What is the point of eternity if you cannot be free?”

“I think we are both chained to something.” He says it as softly as he can, and it is still not enough to convey how much he wishes he could control time between his hands and take them away from all of it, every responsibility and trauma that ties them to the pain that they inflict upon themselves. 

Caleb sighs, and the backs of his knuckles lift from where they’ve been resting on his chest to whisper over the skin of Essek’s cheekbones. 

Essek closes his eyes, and for a moment it feels as though time has stopped, their chains unbound for the span of infinity. It will be over as quickly as it started, once the sun rises, and their eyes cannot stand the bite of the light. 

For the night, though, it is exactly as Caleb wanted it to be, an island away from the fabric of reality. Perhaps these small pockets of infinity can be their deliverance.

Neither of them have yet fully unlocked the mysteries of time—he’s certain they will have more luck in this life, now that Caleb has far more time to work with—but Caleb has always had such an easy time finding mundane ways to bend reality to his will.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You ever write something that feels like repeatedly punching yourself in the gut? Yeah.... Emotions are hard, man.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Please let me know what you think!


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